


surprise party

by audries



Category: The X-Files
Genre: F/M, Fluff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-19
Updated: 2019-08-19
Packaged: 2020-09-07 18:07:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,134
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20313766
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/audries/pseuds/audries
Summary: The cab Scully calls is blue and smells like Chanel and cigarettes. There is a rip in the back seat that has them squeakily situated on either side of a vast styrofoam chasm. Scully rolls down the window a polite half-inch and takes a deep breath.--post-one breath. from the (very old now) tumblr prompt: Mulder & Scully's first time hanging out as tentative friends in an non work capacity. part of my great tumblr migration.





	surprise party

They come into sunlight like a surprise party. Displaced and blinking. Slow smiles and her mouth falling open.

D.C. fall is childishly fickle. Cold wet mornings burning off into hazy afternoons. Scully sheds her black coat like a second skin and fans her cheeks as they emerge from the Hoover’s static shadow.

It’s early enough to make going home seem arbitrary. And the light is golden enough to make the whole trip through early evening traffic seem like an adventure. They’ve been sharing cabs for the past week until Scully’s doctors clear her to drive again and he replaces the tire he popped pulling up to the hospital too fast. They don’t talk about the fact that it is neither logical nor time-cost effective.

“You dial and I’ll direct?” he asks as Scully squints and nods into the bright evening. He can’t help thinking they’ve been quietly turning themselves towards the nocturnal down under their weak skylight. She looks frighteningly alive in the sun.

The cab Scully calls is blue and smells like Chanel and cigarettes. There is a rip in the back seat that has them squeakily situated on either side of a vast styrofoam chasm. Scully rolls down the window a polite half-inch and takes a deep breath.

She says, impassive but not disinterested, in the voice she uses to make autopsy notes, “The leaves changed.”

The past tense catches him in the teeth. He hadn’t noticed. For long weeks after he’d wound his way down from Skyland mountain, he’d kept his curtains closed.

He leans up towards the cabbie and says, “Let us off right around M street and Canal. There’s a gas station there off the Key Bridge, you know it?”

The cabbie waves his hand and steps on the gas. Scully turns fractionally from the window.

“Mulder, I hardly think he needs us to tell him when to get gas.”

“I thought we’d grab some dinner.”

“At a gas station.”

“They have great hot dogs.”

She rolls her eyes in perfect easy annoyance. He thinks, Don’t do that. He thinks, The way you do that made me miss you.

He reaches across the styrofoam break to poke her knee. He says, “Skeptic.”

The hot dogs at the gas station off M Street and Canal are, decidedly, not great. The station itself is a simple gray slab alcove facing the roar of evening bridge traffic.

Scully holds a hot dog in her hand, and her serious black coat slung over her arm. Her blazer is unbuttoned, her blouse such a pale blue it looks white in the light. She speaks in sweet unintentional imitation of herself, says, “Mulder, why are we here?”

This could be the start of any number of cases. They could be in Kansas, in Nebraska, in New Jersey. But they are here. Home. On level ground in a gray parking lot, and Scully does not look singularly determined the way she does when they’re on the clock. It is unexpectedly warm.

He gestures to the back wall of the lot where the stark slate wall disappears for a moment, stutters, before reaching the brick of the adjoining building. From this angle, she can’t see the steps.

He says, “Best place I could think to come and consider all the ways God manages to beat the devil.”

She wrinkles her nose. “What are you talking about?”

He takes her by the elbow connected to her hot-dog-less hand and steers her carefully towards the break in the wall. The steps come cinematically into focus like they’re panning a camera to change the angle.

She looks at the stairs, her eyes only hitting the midway point instead of all the way up to take it all in. She shrugs. “I don’t get it, Mulder.”

He’s momentarily struck by the fact that she might not remember everything they’ve ever done together. Last year, in Tennessee, she’d let slip a hint of quiet weirdness, some strange Scully-Idiosyncrasy. One of my favorite movies, she’d said. He’d suddenly understood why she liked slicing and dicing so much. 

He is beginning to question whether or not she was honest, whether he should have brought her here or anywhere, if he really knows her, if he’s the biggest asshole in the world, if he should have refused to ride in a cab featuring a gaping foam schism, when she laughs from low in her stomach.

“The priest!” she says, looks towards him and back to the stairs. “The Exorcist steps. I must have driven past here a thousand times.”

Mulder says, “The power of Christ compels you.” 

There is an addictive quality to changing the way she sees things. Turning off the lights, altering the angle. He watches her profile. 

Scully glances up at the narrow brick arch above the concrete steps, the yellow-red halo of the lights up the side, burning in the growing dark like streetlamps. She bites her lip. “Are they haunted?”

He shrugs. “Probably.”

Surprise on Dana Scully’s face is somewhat spectacular. It doesn’t have the edge of disbelief or the bite of skepticism or even the wavering lines of shock. She relaxes her shoulders when she’s surprised like she had upon coming unexpectedly into the sunshine. “You don’t know?”

“Nope.”

She looks back at the steps. She wipes ketchup from the corner of her mouth with her thumb, an uncertain smile beginning to grow in its wake. Quietly: “Then why are we here?”

He holds up his hands. “No tricks, G-woman. You can let someone else have the interrogation room. Just thought you might want to see it.”

For a moment she considers him like he’s flat on a slab. She is uncommonly good at scrutiny, her gaze as wide and clear as a focused microscope. Unsuitable for inexperienced handling.

Her capacity to close her eyes at the wrong time, to blink and miss it, was so contrary to the way she saw the world in all its minutiae (Your shoe lace is untied, she’d said this morning, his foot barely over the office threshold) that it seemed almost cosmically absurd. He’d never realized that was part of why he kept trying to make her see things. It was sometimes less about the thing itself and more about whether or not she looked. He wonders briefly if she’s seen the Grand Canyon, the pandas at the National Zoo, a particularly complicated card trick. Anything to make her mouth fall open like that, like emerging into sudden fall warmth, like a surprise party.

He says, “If you look all the way up to the top, I think you can see Linda Blair spider walking down the stairs.”

She laughs and shakes her head. But when he points, she tilts her head back, follows his hand with her eyes wide open.


End file.
